 So our first speaker today is Dr. J. Lund. He's the Director and Center for Watershed Sciences, Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering, University of California, Davis. He had, I think, probably the longest drive here today. Dr. Lund is Director of the Center of Watershed Sciences and Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering, UC Davis. He has long enjoyed teaching, research, and engagement on many aspects of theory and practice of water management and policy. Usually trying to integrate economics, operations research, and traditional engineering. He has become particularly engaged in working on the wide range of problems in California with many collaborators and remains enthusiastic about the potential of systems analysis and optimization to provide understanding and insights for management and policy. He is on the editorial board of several water resources publications and served as president of the University's Council on Water Resources. In California, he was on the advisory committee for the 1998 and 2005 California Water Plan Updates, has served as convener of California Water and Environmental Modeling Forum, and is chair of California's Delta Independent Science Board. He's been long involved in applying economic and organizational ideas to provide insights into California's water problems, including the development of the use of the Calvin model of California's water supply. He is the lead author of Comparing Futures for the Sacramento San Joaquin Delta and Managing California's Water from Conflict to Reconciliation. So please welcome Dr. London. Thank you very much. It's a pleasure to be here. I think the last time I was in this room, one of my kids was up on stage. It's a pleasure to be here. I noticed this is the 35th conference. This is, that's really amazing longevity in conferences and a really important subject. I'm afraid it's still gonna be important for a long, long time, for good and bad. The Center for Watershed Sciences that I now work with a lot, we're in our 20th, this is our 20th anniversary this year or so, we're all getting older. So when I talk about California water with people, most people are in this position. And this applies to elected officials, even to people that have worked in water for their whole career. Because in water, California water, most of you are here from California, even the wonkiest of us only knows a little piece of the picture of what's between the cloud and the faucet or the cloud and the irrigation drainage ditch or the cloud and the salmon stream. I'll try to fill a little bit of it in. But first I wanna look at, reflect a little bit on the hydrology of the last few years. Doesn't have a leader. Okay, you can see here, this is a normal plot from DWR. The driest year of record and you can see the second driest trace here, 2014, 2015 water year. We had four or five years sort of way down in there. And then the 2015, 2016 drought last year. And then we had that blue line up on top, which is the current year. It's the wettest year of record so far. And it was so wet, they even had to shrink the size of the map in order to fit it on the curve. That's how wet it has been this year. Ah, now that works, great. Such a huge range from some of the driest years of record to the wettest year of record, at least so far, all within a few years. A lot of the climate change folks saying, we should expect more extremes. Well, we're seeing a lot of them. We're not seeing anything on average, except for 2016, which was sort of on the way between them. Snowpack, it's not... Snowpack this year is unusually high, not a record-setting one. Again, what you would expect with a warmer climate. Very wet year, but not as wet in terms of hydrology, in terms of snowpack. Huge range here. Let me go back a little bit to the fundamentals of water in California. Anybody here not from California? Okay, so some of you might not know so much of this. The map of the left is the runoff in California. California is mostly a dry place, but we have some wet places as well. So the dark parts on that map on the far left is 20% of the surface area of the state and it's responsible for two-thirds of all the runoff. If you take the light blue and the dark blue together, that's 40% of the surface area. It's responsible for 90% of all the runoff. The red area is 30% of the state of California. It's responsible for 0.1% of all the runoff in the state. We don't have many salmon there. Huge mismatch in space. So where is the agriculture in California? Where are the cities in agriculture in California? Where are the people? It's where the water ain't. When is this water available? When it's available, it's available in the winter. When do we want it for agriculture and for cities? In the summer, in the spring. So we have this tremendous mismatch in space and time for water in California, which makes it heaven for civil engineers. And so the map on the right is the infrastructure that we've built and cajoled and we manage for all of California. You'll see we have lots of reservoirs up in the mountains. We have lots of canals. The canals rival the sizes of many of the rivers. We bring water from everywhere. We take it to the places where there's a lot of agriculture or where there are a lot of people. The other thing I like about this map is it's very colorful. And the colors come from all the different owners. So we have over 1,000, maybe on the order of three or 4,000 different water districts that run this water system. One hydrologic cycle, 4,000 water agencies. You read about this every, no wonder it's so colorful in these papers. We have a lot of natural variation here seasonally from the wet season to the dry season and between the wet years and the dry years. So this was 1983, the wettest year on record. These are unimpaired flow for the Delta. They were pronounced wet season when the snow melt season. And then we have wet years, average years, and then this is the driest year of record, 76, 77. Huge range, more than an order of magnitude range in flow. And this is, of course, the Orville Spellway in better days. I was about to change, but I thought that was too good for today. And just to give you a sense for how weird the hydrology is for California, this shows the coefficient of variation. Now some of you, I realize you're all biologists, but I know a bunch of you took statistic class at one point. And you know that the coefficient of variation is the standard deviation divided by the mean. Because it shows you how unusual things are relative to the central tendency. And I'm from Delaware, I'm from back here. The other J is from Rhode Island, it's up around here. It's very boring back there. What's the weirdest place in the United States? California, obviously. And, well some of California is even weirder, I guess that's true too. And so we have fewer average years compared to the extreme wet and dry. And we certainly have seen that in the last few years, but the statistics bear us out in this. The landscape here has always been changing. And it's continues to change under a lot of human influence. This is what California looked like in the late Pleistocene, before the end of the last ice age. You can see out here the Sacramento San Joaquin Delta outside the Golden Gate Bridge down up by the Farallons. You see a giant glacier on top of the Sierras, which explains why there were no native fish in that part of the world in the recent era. And you see this, a lot of hydrology going on, including very large lakes in the Central Valley. Moving up to just a couple hundred years ago, a hundred years ago or so, 1873, here's a map of the Central Valley. You see Tulare Lake down here. Anybody gone swimming in Tulare Lake lately? Not for a long, long time. Well maybe this year later, they might be able to swim in some of the ditches. All that's gone to irrigate agriculture. All these dark areas here were seasonal or permanent wetlands, 95 or more percent of which are gone. All that salmon rearing habitat is essentially gone. And a lot of it is evaporating off the surface as agricultural productivity. We've built the state water project, federal water project, move water all up and down, pumping water over mountains, all kinds of really cool stuff from an engineering perspective. The other side of the hydrograph, on the wet side, we have the bypass system. This is the city of Marysville in 1955, just before Orville was built. We were worried for a little while, it might look like this again this year, back in February. This is the yellow bypass in 2011. It looks fairly similar to that today in the last few months. Essentially the bypass was a recreation, sort of a bad recreation from an ecological perspective of the overflow that would naturally occur every year, almost every year in the bypass in the Sacramento Valley to accommodate the hydrology we have here. And it was probably historically a tremendous source of rearing habitat for salmon. And we're trying to recreate some of that with some experiments out at Nags Ranch and such today. So it's a very highly altered landscape, but we're not gonna do much to change the fundamental hydrology of having a high coefficient of variation. The management we've done in this system is pretty much decimated, more than decimated. Decimated is only killing off 10%. We've, what's, 90% would be not assaded or something like that. The habitat for salmon. Every place you have a black mark here, so to speak, and the red area is salmon habitat that's been cut off. So certainly the Central Valley used to have a lot more of it. And the habitat we've cut off has been the upper parts which would be better for a warmer climate. So go figure. Again, we've taken away most of the 95% or more of the wetlands. We've recreated some of that in terms of rice habitat, which has helped the birds, but not so much the fish. Well, we're trying to work on that. And this from Peter Moyle is of the freshwater fish in California. We, despite quite considerable attention between 1989 and 2010, we still have more listed species and fewer species that are in good shape. So we still have a long way to go. So that's the bad news. What's the good news? So I was thinking about this during the drought. When you compare California with other places, California is weird as we've already established because we have this Mediterranean climate. So I went and made a list of all the other countries in the world that have a Mediterranean climate. And I thought, well, how do we compare in terms of water management, in terms of the population we support, the wealth of that population, the food production, and what's the condition of the native freshwater aquatic ecosystems? And you can go pretty much through this list and California either does much better or about the same as any other place on these measures. For you all, probably the ecological measure is most interesting where really nobody with a Mediterranean climate is doing very well, but California does as well with South Africa, which is sort of struggling but much diminished. Most of the other places with Mediterranean climates got rid of their native aquatic ecosystems maybe a few thousand years ago in some ways. So in some senses, we're doing really well here, but I think we'd all agree that we have a long ways we'd like to go. It's a tough neighborhood when you're dealing with a Mediterranean climate. Just to point out some of the successes we've had in the last several years and some of our failures as well. The drought from 2018 to 2012 to 2016, oh, 1016. Wow, how'd I do that? Okay, the cusp of a millennia. We lost essentially 30% of our normal water supply during that period for five years. And losing that much water supply, we lost 3% of our agricultural revenues. I find that remarkable, that you can lose a third of your water supply and lose only a .03 of your agricultural revenues. And yet, even during that period because we're continuing to shift the economy in agriculture to more permanent, higher profit crops, we had absolute increases in revenues and in employment in agriculture. But it would have been another 3% or 5% higher had we not had the drought. We went through this huge drought. We had essentially almost undetectable economic losses to urban areas. Even in 2015, when the governor required the state board enforced a 25% reduction in urban water use. How do you have a 25% reduction in urban water use where 97% of the economic production is occurring and not see any detectable economic losses? Because half of human water use in California on the urban side is keeping their lawns green. So very small part of the economy. We did see some severe rural water supply impacts. People with dried up wells. The other Jay will tell you a lot about that, I suspect. We had some severe fish impacts and we had very severe forest impacts up and down the Sierras. And one of the things we learned out of this was the importance of groundwater because particularly for agriculture, that was two thirds of the reason why that number is so low was the farmers picked up the pumping of groundwater, the overdraft of groundwater. Okay, let's take it to the opposite extreme. What we've been seeing this year and the year's not completely over yet but we can make some kind of assessment. It's the wettest year of record so far. So big they had to shrink them out. We had spillway failures on Orville Dam. Not just one, but two. We were pretty lucky. We felt we only had to evacuate 190,000 people when we didn't actually flood them. For San Jose, a much more controlled environment, much smaller reservoir was at stake here. They had to evacuate 14,000 people and they actually flooded out most of those homes with about $73 million worth of damage. We had lots of local flooding and you've probably all ran across some roads where you drove through a little bit of wetness. The wetness out there, the wet fields are gonna delay farming activities, are gonna impose some economic losses on agriculture this year. We've had some small levee breaches that have caused local agricultural flooding and in some places like McCormick-Williams retract, we've had some breaches that have caused what I will call unpermitted habitat restoration which hopefully we can preserve. Nature can sometimes move much faster than even our most populated bureaucracies. Maybe we should take advantage of this when we can. And the fish effects I think are, we won't know for a while yet. But it's a good lesson for us because for a while there we were thinking that California was never gonna see floods anymore and now we're reminded. But I think this is remarkable. We have 29 million people, $1.3 trillion of economic activity, the wettest year of record and this is the worst nature could do to us. And a lot of this was self-inflicted. I think it's remarkable how well we've done in this climate given how variable it is. Now, could we do better? Should we do better? Obviously, that's the only reason we do as well as we do is we're not very patient with ourselves. But everything is not completely screwed up. For the humans, why is that? Why have we gotten so good at this as humans in managing water in California? Let's look at the water supply side first. And my theme here is portfolios, portfolio management. A lot of gray hairs out there, a few gray hairs out there. So I know some of you are thinking about portfolios for retirement and that you're all buying Microsoft stock. And that's it, right? Hopefully you're diversifying your portfolios, you've got lots of different things you're doing so that it's more stable, more robust and you're hoping to work till you're 75. In the water supply, one of the reasons we got through the drought so well was we had a very diversified supply. If you looked at the previous drought, 1988 to 92, the urban areas in that time were not nearly so well diversified, not nearly so well intertied, did not cooperate as well with their neighbors and they had very severe impacts. Much more so than last drought anyway. And what you do when you look at urban water supplies these days is you look at, well, let's look at the whole portfolio on the water supply side. Source protection, stormwater capture, how are we gonna gather up water, how are we gonna store it in ground water and surface water for, how are we gonna operate with our neighbors, conjunctive use with the ground water, buy and sell water, be able to convey water from where it's stored or from where there is water. How do we reuse it locally? What new treatment plants can we build to make use of that water? And then on the demand side, how do we reduce demands? How do we improve efficiencies? How do we make the best of what we get? And then because water supplies are essentially millions of people all with their hands on a faucet, how do you get all of these millions of people to behave in ways that make the system work well? So you have pricing and markets and subsidies and education, all these things come together to give you a portfolio of how you manage things for urban water supplies. And we got through this horrible drought really with very little damage at all in comparison. On the flood side, how do we go through the wettest year of record in California and not have millions of people displaced? How come we didn't lose Sacramento in this wettest year of record? There were times in the past when we lost Sacramento in years like this back in the 1800s, early 1900s. Well, again, we have a portfolio of actions. And here we typically divide them up into preparatory actions. What do you do before a flood? Because that's when you have the most time to do something about a flood. And you build all of these infrastructure, sort of structural measures as we call them, but there's also a whole bunch of non-structural measures, vulnerability reduction we now call them, where you try to move people out of the flood plain, you elevate their structures, things like that. And then in flood response actions, what do you do during a flood? There was a nice flood in 1993 in Idaho, Iowa rather, where they had a very large system of levees and they had these flood gates and flood walls, but this town got flooded anyway because somebody forgot to close the flood door between the river and the city. So actually responding is important. But sometimes you do things like design the infrastructure like the bypass system for the most part, where it just works. The water overflows a weir into the bypass. And then we have recovery actions, both on the repairing the infrastructure and going back and reconstructing and trying to remove damageable property from the flood plain after the flood. So we have a whole portfolio of actions and quite a few agencies that work between local, state and federal agencies to make these things come together. On water quality, it used to be that a lot of people would die from drinking water. And now they don't, at least in this country. How did we do that? Well, we have a portfolio approach there as well. We have a philosophy in environmental engineering, sanitation engineering called the multiple barriers approach where you take some chemicals and you ban them outright. Although we might be seeing less of that in the current administration. We have source protection. We try to keep the rivers cleaner. And then, because we don't trust those things to always be in effect, we treat the water when we take it out. We manage the distribution to keep it clean. And then for the cases where we have diseases that creep through this whole system of multiple barriers, we have a public health system to identify, oh yes, this person got sick because of the drinking water and now we need to go back up in here. So, and you saw this work at Flint, but we don't have flints very often. I hope we don't. More often than we'd like, but on the whole, it's better than living in China, which is the second most prosperous economy in the world. To parallel this system of multiple barriers, we have multiple institutions. Again, just like we have multiple physical barriers, we have multiple institutional barriers. So we have a lot of redundancy and water quality. We don't like killing people and we don't like it so much that we have lots of different people that are responsible for it, almost like water supply. So we have local boards, public health agencies, local utilities, state regulators, federal regulators, professional societies in universities, all that play a role in making this system work. And this essentially happens for all of these portfolio approaches. Now let's go and look at salmon. The area where we haven't done well during this drought and during these wet years and in California in general. Here we have a salmon life cycle. You guys know much more about this than I do, but we've got essentially geographic segmentation here. Salmon come out of the ocean, they go up the rivers to spawn, so they have to be able to get up there. We don't let them do that because of dams quite often now. When they get to places that they can spawn, they need some characteristics there. Once the salmon hatch from there, mature a little bit, then they move down in the rivers, tributaries, flood plains, and eventually out to sea. And they have to have good rearing habitat down there. So this cycle for salmon life history I think helps us define what a portfolio system might look like for salmon and ecosystems as well. So you'd identify what do you need in each of these stages in the life cycle? And you look at these separately and then together because the whole cycle doesn't work if there's a very, it works as well as the weakest link essentially. And then this would lead us to a bigger circle if you will of what elements of a portfolio might you identify for each of these segments? And then I think ultimately the thing that we need to do is not only identify these elements but identify people responsible for making sure these things happen and making sure that these elements are coordinated and paid for. I think that's always our hardest part, being paid for. We're very good with public health because people pay for that in their water bills every day. All those people that irrigate their lawns profusely, that money goes in and is used disproportionately to subsidize the public health, the water quality and the water supply delivery. The property taxes help us with the flood control. We don't really have that funding model and that institutional model for coordination on the ecosystem side and I think that the weaknesses have shown up in this drought. So for building an integrated ecosystem portfolio, we should look at the life cycle support. How can we support each stage of the life cycle, recognize that the population is only as strong as the weakest stage? How do we develop institutional support to coordinate across and within each of these stages and provide enough assets and organization to give us the flexibility for managing this portfolio in a highly variable hydrology that we have in California. One of the things that really shocked me in this drought was everybody had drought plans except for the ecosystem. And that's really the area that fell short and it likes the slide so much. Microsoft PowerPoint has stopped working. We start the program. See, there's that life cycle once again. Thank you Bill Gates for pausing my talk. So there's some reasons to hope here. I think things are getting better for the salmon at least because we're gonna see diminishing growth, at least diminishing growth in human water demands and probably absolute diminishment in human water demands. Hopefully that makes it easier for the salmon and the ecosystems. If you look at the growth and gross urban and agricultural water use, it's essentially flattened out. We have more and more people but they're using less water per capita so urban is sort of flattened out. We've largely irrigated most of the agricultural land we're likely to see grown and the Sustainable Ground Water Management Act is gonna essentially reduce some of that agricultural use over time. Our economy, our economic structure depends a lot less on water. So the economic damage we see from a water shortage is much less in California than it would have been 40 or 50 years ago. Look at the different sectors of California's economy in terms of employment. Mining which used a lot of water is almost nothing. Agriculture which uses 80% of the human water use is down to about 5% of the agriculture of the economy as a whole. Recreation, non-recreation services, other goods. We rarely use very little water to provide all that economic activity. So the shift in economic structures really helped us for managing droughts and making more water available at less cost hopefully for ecosystems. We have water markets that we can help use shift to shift things around, civilize change and we agree we have a problem. That's one nice thing about having the dry and wet years together. Some quick conclusions. California is a dry place with many water demands. Droughts and floods are very good at reminding us that we need to make changes. If you look at the history of California water, droughts and floods have really helped us make improvements. The economy is robust to water now overall but the ecosystems are still the most harmed and least well-prepared in terms of their management. Portfolios are really the core for water management success and I think this is the weakness of ecosystems. We haven't developed a portfolio approach across the agencies and a way to fund it. As part of all of this, we need much better water accounting and I think in all of this area, it's important for us to be somewhere between complacency and panic. When people panic, we don't do very well. We don't make very good decisions and it tends to come back at us. But if we're complacent, we don't make progress. So I think it's always important to try to steer between those two. There are gonna be big changes in California water over time. Need to list at one point of, here are all the changes that we're gonna see no matter who's in the White House, no matter who's in the governor's office, no matter what happens with climate change, we're gonna see these kind of changes. And they're gonna be fairly big but they're not gonna be catastrophic for most of us. Maybe for a few salmon runs but hopefully we can do something about that. But there are gonna be some big changes. And because I'm a professor, I'll give you some, I'll leave with some readings. So there we go. That's the end of my talk. Thank you for being patient with me and my PowerPoint. So we have some time for some questions. Yes. Speak louder. Oh yeah, so this is my favorite question. What is this map of? This is the audience participation question. Oh my. You guys must be young. We lost this. What was that map? That was the vote on the peripheral canal 1982. It's basically cultural geography. Northern California doesn't like Southern California. I have a question. So you talked about how far the environment has diverged from historical conditions. You also talked about this portfolio or this resiliency the infrastructure has in terms of management. So how is that? Is that incongruent that you made the statement that the environment or the ecosystems don't have a portfolio? Because what their portfolio would be might be constrained by that. So I'm trying to wrestle that incongruence between this portfolio that you expressed in terms of the infrastructure and the management and society and this lack of portfolio and salmon and ecosystems. I think we've been trying to manage California's water for ecosystems for maybe 20 years in a serious way. We've been trying to manage water systems not to kill people for really the last 150 years. And it took us a long, we killed a lot of people before we figured out how to provide people with clean drinking water. We killed a lot of people with floods before we got organized and built infrastructure and organized cities and zonings to keep people from getting flooded out. So I think it's mostly a matter of we're still struggling to figure out how to manage ecosystems. And we haven't figured out a way to dedicate resources to it and organize the different agencies to do it. Based money on what we should help from. Well, you're asking an engineer a biology question and that's not a really, you gotta be careful with those kind of questions. You don't want me to answer that really because I'm not gonna know anything. So I won't, but somebody's gonna answer that question because the resource, where do you focus on? There were some diseases, waterborne diseases that were not as high in priority as the waterborne diseases that we addressed first and were successful with. So maybe history can give us some lessons on how do we make decisions on what we allocate our effort to and what we train ourselves up on really so we get more effective on other things. We worry about water quality issues today that we wouldn't have given any thought to at all a hundred years ago. Some of the carcinogens were one in a million chances of dying from when we were losing 30,000 people a year in Philadelphia every summer to waterborne diseases. We didn't care about those other risks. I think we ought to prioritize a little bit and focus, make sure we do something really well and then after we get well organized and solving some of these problems, it'll make it easier to solve some of the others. So remember your questions, we'll have some, a whole, all the speakers up for about 25 minutes of questions after all three presentations. So join me in thanking Dr. Orton for this. Thank you.